Biography (read more)
Maria Israilevna Grinberg was born in Odessa on 24 August 1908 (6 September, New Style), the daughter of a Hebrew scholar and a private piano teacher, and studied until she was eighteen with the Odessa teacher David Aisberg, then with Felix Blumenfeld and, after his death, with Konstantin Igumnov at the Moscow Conservatory. She took second prize at the Second All-Union Pianists’ Competition in 1935. In 1937 her second husband, the Polish poet Stanisław Stande, and her father were both arrested and executed as enemies of the people; she was dismissed by the state concert agency and took work accompanying an amateur dance group, occasionally playing timpani in concerts. She died at Tallinn on 14 July 1978.
She was readmitted as a soloist and became one of the most sought-after pianists in Moscow, playing across the Soviet Union, but was allowed abroad only after Stalin’s death, when she was fifty; of fourteen foreign tours, twelve were within the Soviet bloc and two in the Netherlands, where critics compared her with Horowitz, Rubinstein and Clara Haskil. Official recognition came late and thinly — a single honorary title, Distinguished Artist of the RSFSR, at fifty-five, and a professorship at the Gnessin Institute at sixty-one. Maria Yudina, a close friend, said Grinberg was the one person she wanted to play at her funeral.
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